


Salvage

by VictorSinister



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scars, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 13:11:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7362691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictorSinister/pseuds/VictorSinister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max meets a War Boy who’s suffering similar mental health issues to his own, and considers what he could do to help. (Mild body horror warning for Morsov’s scars and missing arm.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salvage

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted here: http://victorsinister.tumblr.com/post/134496283505/salvage
> 
> The idea for this fic came from Tumblr discussion on whether or not Morsov could have somehow survived getting himself blown up, and what sort of state he’d be in. We all agreed that lasting brain injuries and extensive scarring were likely.

From time to time, Max returned to the Citadel. He could no longer put down roots, as if the very concept of stability was too fraught with the risk of its collapse. It was an utterly irrational belief, but he couldn’t shake the delusion that his presence caused things to go wrong. Better to stay away and make that anxiety easier to ignore.

When he did return, it was out of necessity. When he needed security, companionship, respite from the ghosts that hounded him. In the Citadel, they didn’t come with nearly the same ferocity.

But they still came.

He woke up reaching for people long dead, traumas he’d faced a thousand times that felt as powerful as the day they’d occurred. Angharad and her child were among them now, as were a pack of bone-white, eyeless War Boys. More souls added to the litany of those he couldn’t save.

The shadowed shape across the room was so motionless, warped, that Max had believed it was another memory at first. A big, bulky War Boy, the left side of his body slumped and the right side darkened by scar tissue. A shapless lump of meat where his right arm should have been. But the wounds were old, nearly healed. Max’s hallucinations never healed. If they were injured, it was as fresh as the day they died.

He aknowledged the man with a grunt and a nod, and laid back down.

“So y’ get… y'know… y’ see things too?” The War Boy’s voice was slow and laboured, as if he was carefully choosing each word. Max knew that tone all too well, heard it in his own speech, but there was something else there too, a lack of clarity caused by injury.

Once again, he nodded. “Mhm. I do.”

They sank back into silence again. Max could hear the other man’s breathing, and rested a hand on his bandaged chest to feel the rise and fall of his own breath. That was a constant, at least. Back in the world past, a shrink had told him to focus on his own breathing when everything else was too much. He’d practiced a lot. Didn’t always work, but it was something to allay the fear that there was nothing that he could do. He’d always had that fear. As a kid, as a teen - maybe that was why he’d became a cop - and as an adult while the end was approaching. Sometimes, he’d felt that he was the only one who’d known what was coming.

He heard the chair creak. A few heavy footsteps, he tracked the War Boy across the room to his bed, knew when he was going to sit down and had his intuition confirmed by the end of his bed groaning under the weight of a second body. Sound, that was another thing to focus on.

“I’m like a… like you… feral War Boy or somethin’?”

Max grinned. He remembered when he’d thought he was going insane too. It had been good to put a name to it. “No. PTSD.” There was some shifting at the end of the bed. The slightest pressure on his leg, a hand ghosting over the blanket.

“Wha’s PD… SD…?” That slow speech wasn’t easing up, and the guy clearly wasn’t going to understand that acronym. It had been quite a new term when Max had been diagnosed all those years ago. The shrink who’d introduced him to it had taught him with a sense of urgency, wanting to give him the mental tools to cope in a society that was rapidly going to hell.

“Mhm. You can touch me.” He raised his leg a little to put his foot flat on the mattress, and felt the War Boy’s big hand squeeze his knee gently. Touch, that could be an anchor as well. It felt good, could even have been a bit firmer. “Shell shock. Bad stuff in our past hurt our brains.”

“Like a… a wound? An’ yer… better-er?”

Of course, these kids had no concept of psychology. They probably had little concept of how minds worked, that knowledge was dying out with the last generation to live in a world where people weren’t so busy battling their own sickness that they couldn’t address the suffering of others. “Can’t get rid of it. Gotta live with it.”

Max heard a choked gasp, maybe a sob. Yes, he could remember that moment too. The realisation that there was no easy way out. That madness was now part of life. The only choices were to ride the wave or sink.

He could help them make the choice to go on living.

He cleared his throat, preparing the words before he said them. Lining them up so they’d come out properly. “Tonight, after work’s done… get the ones like us. The ones with shell shock. Bring them here. I want to teach them to live with it.”


End file.
